The Reuse Center used to be a warehouse full of reclaimed castoffs, a mish-mosh of home improvement items, old golf clubs, unloved books and music, and the very rare bit of electronics. Everything was priced to move, and we're sad that it's gone, having closed due to the current peculiar... Continue reading

The [jetson-ffmpeg](https://github.com/jocover/jetson-ffmpeg) package accelerates portions of the [ffmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/) audio and video conversion tool on the Jetson Nano. My initial tests show 25% speedups on m4a conversions from files that originate on Youtube. The build process depends on having a current version of Jetpack software. My first attempt at building the... Continue reading

[json2csv](https://mircozeiss.com/json2csv/) converts json into csv with column titles and proper line endings. It will work on a lot of JSON files, though if your input is deeply nested it might be tricky to bend it to your will. See [zemirco/json2csv](https://github.com/zemirco/json2csv) on Github, or [json2csv](https://www.npmjs.com/package/json2csv) on npm. It is written for... Continue reading

"If I cannot dictate the conditions of my work I shall hence forth cease to labor." Utah Philips Continue reading

Previously, a [goal](https://vielmetti.typepad.com/logbook/2020/09/goal-complex-system-install-with-minimum-fuss.html). Currently, a set of [gists](https://gist.github.com/vielmetti/6b8e689a73ead8958b3f6dadd0b5b920), which get close to what I'm looking to do, but which haven't been extensively tested. Some notes. The fast path to getting GPU-enabled systems set up has been via Ansible, namely a few roles that have been published on Galaxy that encapsulate... Continue reading

Goal: take a complex piece of software, install it on a powerful machine quickly and without a lot of fuss, and then use it to address a recognizable task. When you're done, tear the hardware down and return it to some other use. Specific goal: take [Rapids.AI](https://rapids.ai), install it on... Continue reading

A lot of years ago, I came up with this plan, which I called the [Blogger's Secret](https://vielmetti.typepad.com/secret/) 1. Pick a topic. 2. Write about it twice a day. 3. In six months, you will be an expert on that topic. At that point I noted > One constraint that is... Continue reading

[gitea 1.12.4 is released](https://blog.gitea.io/2020/09/gitea-1.12.4-is-released/), with bug fixes. I'm running on Docker with the :latest tag, which is a development version. If you like me wanted to downgrade from 1.13-dev to 1.12.4, you'd run into [Panic: unrecognized repo unit type: 8](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/10849), issue 10849. The database has an enum for repo type,... Continue reading

I'm looking for some storage that's reasonably sturdy to run a media server on it to spin MP3s. Eventually, I'll want to rip a bunch of weird CDs that I have that aren't ever going to be on Spotify, and right now I want to play a half dozen mix... Continue reading

Yesterday, I saved some data to Backblaze B2 using Restic as a backup program. Today I wanted to make sure that I could do a restore. Restic offers normal restores where you undump a whole backup, or a single file from that backup. But unusual to me was the option... Continue reading

Since getting Gitea running on my Pi, I realize that for the first time there's some data gravity there. If that machine gets clobbered, I'll lose not just caches of works in progress, but some actual data. Not very much data, and as it happens mostly data that's already in... Continue reading

Gitea is "Git with a cup of tea", a self-hosted Git repository that's very reminiscent of Github. It has repos, issues, all of the familiar stuff you'd expect from a first glance. Install instructions for [Gitea running under Docker](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/install-with-docker/) are straightforward. The one tweak I added was that because I'm... Continue reading

How do you incentivize people to act or work towards sustainability of an OSS project? - [Adhita](https://twitter.com/adhitadselvaraj/status/1300238267921518592), query posted to Twitter, August 30 2020. Twitter is too small to answer such a good question. There's a lot of variety within open source, and a lot of levels of project maturity.... Continue reading

In many cases, the version of Go (golang) provided by the system is old. Getting the latest Go by downloading a tarball is expedient but hard to manage. Here are some ways to get a latest (or nearly latest) Go through a package manager. This is prompted in part by... Continue reading

Imagine bricks made of molasses mixed with pumice, applied to systems in order to protect them but rough to deal with. From John Gall's "Systemantics" When Charles Babbage, early in the Nineteenth Century, attempted to build the world's first large calculating machine he made the parts of wood and promptly... Continue reading

If you are running Salt on Catalina, and if you can register a minion correctly but can't send it any commands, and if your logs show this error: ``` AttributeError: 'Process' object has no attribute '_args_for_getstate' ``` then you have run into bug [#57742](https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/57742) from June 2020. cdalvaro has copied... Continue reading

Some more notes on Saltstack. [Configuring Prometheus targets with Salt](https://backbeat.tech/blog/configuring-prometheus-targets-with-salt/), Backbeat Technologies, Glynn Forrest. Techniques for automatically adjusting the list of Prometheus targets you are using, e.g. in the case where the hosts are in an auto-scale group. Uses the "Salt Mine" construct to collect the data. [SaltStack cheat sheet](https://github.com/harkx/saltstack-cheatsheet),... Continue reading

My home lab - aka the menagerie of systems in my attic - has a bunch of different systems in it. No two are identical. A couple of them have radios attached, a couple of them have spinning rust or SSD drives attached, one has some environmental sensors, and the... Continue reading

My RD-5R gives about 0.4% BER when talking to my MMDVM hotspot, but my GD-77 with the same configuration gives nearly 1.0% BER. Audio quality is still good, but of course it's worthwhile to tune things to minimum error rates regardless. Some notes on tuning the TX level on the... Continue reading

Previously: [2019](https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2019/10/2019-software-defined-baseball-radio-listening-recap.html) and [2018](https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2018/06/kiwisdr-and-am-baseball-radio-dx.html). The goal is to enjoy as much of the pandemic-shortened 2020 baseball season as I can via listening to far-away AM stations through SDR receivers. I'm continuing to use the baseball section of my [commonplace book](https://emv-commonplace.netlify.app/baseball/) to keep track of who's broadcasting where, and where you... Continue reading

I got two new Radioddity GD-77 radios the other day - one for new ham KE8PFB, and one for myself. Programming the radio from the keypad is awkward but not impossible, and we got one analog channel up and running to reach the ARROW repeater. That was plenty to confirm... Continue reading

Our ARPSC (Skywarn) net switched to a new check-in protocol on the Sunday night net. Rather than giving your entire info all in one go, you check in with just a call sign, and then net control calls a roster. This makes the net more of a directed net, and... Continue reading

Previously, [walking away from Twitter](https://vielmetti.typepad.com/logbook/2020/06/logbook-deleting-my-twitter-password.html). It was about two months of detox, and I think I have a strategy going forward for dealing with Twitter. It has to do with staying on message and on brand, and not diverging from same. The new focus is on ham radio and on... Continue reading

Meat burrito and an espresso over ice. Note to self, the ice at Rosewood is soft and crunchy but it's not cubes, and this would have been a better drink with cubed ice. Continue reading